I needed (wanted -- same thing...) to build a half wall above the basement stairs before I got to start on laying the new bamboo flooring.
So, that's what I started on today. The wall is up, but only partially sheathed in drywall.

Took last week off to get a little break after our big launch at work. It turned into a fairly busy period in between all the loafing on the couch.
Highlights:

Had a meeting with Ma and her giant dog rescue crew and got them introduced to my boss in case we can do some pro-bono work for them. We have a meeting scheduled for this Tuesday, so we'll see if anything comes of it.

Took Mingus in for shoulder x-rays to see if anything joint-related was making him gimpy. Turns out the joints look pretty darned good. Hooray no surgery for the dog.

I had a medical visit myself, but that warrants its own post... Coming soon... ;)

The Wife and I are suddenly both able to jog something like 2.5 miles continuously. This is a big jump from where we were. I definitely believe a course change is the prime contributor to the improvement.

Since September of 2007, I've manage to whittle myself from around 220lbs to 190-ish. I only have this to say: It's a lot of friggin' work.

I cannot tell you how excited I am about GTA IV. The multiplayer action looks like a flat out hoot. Email me if you want my Xbox Live gamer tag. ;)

I'm really pleased with the results of my latest slate tile project. Now I'm itching to switch into woodworking mode. I'm super excited about the new episodes of the New Yankee Workshop: Norm is building kitchen cabinets. I plan to eventually build cabinets for the mudroom and perhaps the garage (as practice for the potential "big job" of the actual kitchen). I think I'll go ahead and buy the DVDs.

I'm gradually building up my home entertainment system to match the new TV. I've gotten a fancy HDMI-switching receiver and a fairly cool iPod dock thingy. Next on my list is a TiVo HD. Then some surround speakers of some sort (I'm still living in stereo, folks...). And then maybe an Xbox 360, finally. (Still holding out for GTA4 on that one.)

On the fitness front, my weight dipped below 200 pounds for the first time in a while yesterday. It's back above today, but we'll assume that's temporary. I'm going to join a climbing gym soon, I think. A great new motivator I have is the Garmin Forerunner 205 I got for Xmas. It's not as sexy as the new 405 everyone is drooling over, but it's pretty darned cool. Of course, now I'm obsessed with tracking the slightest walk / jog / jaunt to the mail box. When The Wife teased me about it I quipped, "Are you kidding? I'm gonna track my trips to the bathroom from now on!"

Lots of interesting gossip about former coworkers and new coworkers. That's about all I'll say about that, I suppose.

I'm still an Obama cheerleader, though I don't generally like to air my politics on this site. I like the look of things right now.

We've got issues with our cable intarwebs at the house, so posting will be even more sparse than usual while I a) dick around with Comcast b) order DSL and wait for the modem to arrive.
Update: And we're back! Whew!

Firstly, it's worth noting that The Mother-in-Law has a new dog. Molly is a blue heeler mix of some sort. She's really sweet, though a bit crazy and fairly untrained. We're hopeful, though, since Australian Cattle Dogs are in the top ten for dog breed intelligence. ;)
Next on the docket are the mighty Rockies. Now, I'm not a baseball fan. I root for the Red Sox on principal alone. But c'mon! Who doesn't love a "hometown underdog does good" story? Best of all, I know one Phillies fan who is an extremely sore loser. This could be fun.

In general, Autumn is upon us. The transition seasons always get me fired up in one way or another.

The Wife and I are taking a lot of long walks with Mingus to try to shed some pounds and keep the dog happy.

I've barely been on the Bonneville this year, but it's OK. My favorite riding time is now, so hopefully I'll get in the saddle at least a few times. I wish I was like these guys.

I'm itching to start a home project or a woodworking project (or both) soon. Updates when I do.

So the big news of the past few days is the hot water heater saga:
Last Thursday evening The Wife and I went out in Boulder to the Rio with a gaggle of my new coworkers. After a lovely evening discussing the possibilities of attending a roller derby, a mixed martial arts bout, or a minor league hockey game (or all three) with the company founder's wife, we came home to discover that we had no hot water. A quick trip downstairs revealed that our twelve-year-old tank was done and dead and pissing itself on the basement floor. Off go the water valves, and I know what I get to do Friday (hardly a worthwhile day off work, if you ask me).

Long story shorter than it might be: We actually had the funds on-hand to do the upgrade to a tankless water heater like I've wanted to do. Now I'm a proud owner of a Rinnai unit hidden away in my crawl space. The old space for the water heater is now only filled by a wall-mounted control panel. Best of all, I can take a shower all friggin' day long if I want to.

There are couple downsides: the hot water is mighty slow to come at first; the hot water pressure is noticeably lower than that of the cold water. But neither of those bother me much -- the continuous nature of the hot water (I can now happily take my shower after everyone else in the house!) more than balances them out, IMO. (Oh, and I guess I get $300 next tax season...)
Also worth noting: David at Oasis Plumbing rules me - highly recommended.

Other News:

I went for the first ride of 2007 on the Bonneville today. Hooray, Spring!

This evening, I got the urge to try and make a wallet out of Gorilla Tape. I'd call the project a definite success (especially considering this was a first go at it), but the result won't be replacing my usual wallet.

Related note: I like the new Craft magazine even more than I enjoy it's big brother, Make.

The hard work (thankfully) is done. The grout needs to cure a bit and then the whole thing needs to be sealed (and then we have to move all our crap back in there).
I love it (and still hate it for what it did to me).

First a floor update: After taking yesterday off completely thanks to the chill I caught on the motorbike and general laziness (it is a vacation, after all), I came out firing today. First, I scooted around on the subfloor removing the remaining staples from the carpet pad. After that bag o' fun, I scooted around on the subfloor some more, this time sanding the seams of the OSB to flatten them out enough for the mortar bed not to mind. After a bunch of sweeping and vacuuming and choking on the dust (I'm positively covered...), I finally got around to measuring out a standard centerline by centerline layout and giving it a bit of a dry fit test, as demonstrated below (see also: my Flickr set for this project):
Office Slate Project: Testing the Layout SW
Originally uploaded by Jake Sutton.

Car update: The mechanic tells me "there's definitely something wrong in the clutch area" of my Rodeo. So he's going to drop the tranny and see what's what. His initial guess (which covers a new clutch and clutch fork) is about $1400. Sadly, this is almost exactly the number I was expecting. Here's hoping it doesn't grow much.

One from teh intarweb: Seriously? People worry about this crap? Myself, I don't sign off personal emails at all. If it's someone I don't know that well or haven't been in touch with recently I might end with "- Jake". On rare occasions, I'll toss in a "Cheers" or "Ta". Work emails generally just get the hyphen-space-name treatment.

This is only somewhat hampered by the fact that my car broke yesterday (on the way back from fetching the remainder of my slate purchase, in fact) -- clutch went bye-bye. We'll see that that going to do to me tomorrow, hopefully.

I have a shit-ton of projects I would like to do around the house. This is a (probably partial -- I'm a little crazy...) list, which I am posting now to maybe force myself to get moving on at least one.

Sand & stain the deck (This is must this year!).

Fiddle with the new front door handle so that it's "right".

Re-key the new garage door handle so that it matches the front door.

Tile office floor (slate or something similar).

Tile the mudroom (slate or something similar) -- perhaps extend this to the kitchen door way and the top of the stairs.

Build cabinets, etc. for the mud room.

Replace master bath carpet (Carpet in a bathroom is icky!) with cork tiles.

Reconfigure the walk-in closet.

Build a console/cabinet/printer stand to go between the new desks in the office.

Friday, I called in sane and ended up spending the day moving a sprinkler head and getting my sprinklers fired up. Sadly, I'm already well behind the Joneses as far as the green lawn competition goes. ;)

In the evening I met up with Holzie and some folks from work for one of his many sendoffs. (He joined the Marines...)

Saturday, I tried really hard not to die from the allergic attack I suffered after spending so much time in the Spring air Friday.

Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, I worked on a pair of desks for our office.

We also found a paint color for our office (so someday soon, we'll have to remove the desks we just set up in there).

Did I mention allergies suck? Gotta say the Benadryl Dreams were entertaining, though.

Caught up on seven or eight TiVo'ed episodes of Veronica Mars. I don't care if it makes me a girl; I love that show.

I think I went to Home Depot four times over the course of three days.

Man, it seems like Google has de-listed the BlahStuff (or at least ranked me down a ton). My traffic has dropped by more than half starting last Wednesday. If any of y'all that get regular Google hits felt like mentioning BS in a fresh post in the hopes to re-upping my Google-juice, I'd appreciate it.

Started working on a new double desk set-up for our office on Saturday. Got some nice 3/4" maple veneer plywood and glued some half-inch MDF on the bottom to strengthen it up a bit. Got to use my flush-cutting router bit for the first time, but then it got all cold and snowy. Gonna treat the edges with some strips of this cool laminated oak I have, so it should give a cool effect. Photos when there's something to see.

My tattoo has a few spots that will require touch-up. I wonder if it's just me, in general, or the forearm location, specifically, or a combo that cause me such problems in healing my tattoos.

My efforts at work on the superultramegaubercrazy-high priority project have come to a rather frustrating result so far thanks to interoperability problems between ColdFusion 5 and Oracle9. Every time we hit the Oracle9 database it causes the memory usage of the ColdFusion server to climb, with that memory never being released. This eventually causes the connection to the database to die with an S1001 Memory Allocation Error, which requires a ColdFusion restart to fix the problem (until the memory allocation builds back up again). Super-fucking-duper.

The Big Blue Couches rock. While we are trying to keep the pets off them, it's obviously futile. At least the puddles of Mingus hair come off the ultra-luscious blue microsuede without a problem. I'm just extra-pleased with the fact taht I can lie completely prostrate on the big sofa without touching either arm.

The Wife and I have been to the hotbox yoga a total of three times so far. I am enjoying it quite a bit, though I think I may have overstretched my back the last time out. We hope to squeeze a couple more classes into our two week trial period.

My motorcycle wrenching buddy Erik and his wife are inches away from having their baby boy. Very exciting times for them!

I'll be brining the second turkey of the month for Thanksgiving festivities starting tonight. If you haven't brined a turkey or at least eaten the product of said process, I can't even express how much you need to try it.

Breastfeeding appears to reduce diabetes risk -- Huh... Of course this is one of those studies that will eventually be conflicted by another study that says "breastfeeding give you brain tumors" or something. Kind of liek the red wine is good/bad for you studies.